Annette Hurley (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise too to note the answers that Senator Minchin gave on climate change and also the responses of Senator Ian Campbell and Senator Kemp. They were marked by sarcasm, mockery and an attack on the Labor Party, but there was very little attempt to deal with the actual issues. That is, of course, because the Liberal government have made very little attempt to deal with the issues. They talk about not having targets and not signing Kyoto and say that it will not make any difference. They talk about not having unilateral targets for greenhouse gas emissions and yet they will not participate in the only multilateral forum that is around: Kyoto. They have refused to participate in the one multilateral forum they have. They talk about some other multilateral forum, hoping that it will never eventuate.

The government’s approach is to just hope that it will all go away and they will not have to deal with it in the end. This is in a situation in the Australian economy where more and more businesses—large businesses, medium businesses—are calling for some pricing signals on carbon emissions from the government, and the government have been studiously refusing to deal with this. The end result is that the states have tried to deal with it on their own in a unilateral fashion.

I am very pleased that the South Australian government has been one of the states that have attempted to deal with greenhouse gas emissions by themselves. Senator Ian Campbell made fun of them. He said that they were not successful, that it was too difficult for them, and yet he did not address the central issue, which is the fact that they are trying to deal with emissions themselves because the federal government—the national government, which is the natural government that should be dealing with these kinds of national issues—is missing in action. That is precisely why the state governments have attempted to deal with emissions by themselves. The Howard government is getting increasingly arrogant, increasingly not consultative and increasingly combative with those states in an attempt to salvage its government record and deal with the possibility that it might not win the next election. It is not dealing with the critical issue that we need to deal with. The government lacks the will or the ability to deliver national action on this very important issue.

In the short time that I have left to me, I want to deal with Labor’s response. The Labor opposition is having a climate change summit and is attempting to get policy together on this very critical issue. The government has talked about its Greenhouse Office. The opposition unfortunately does not have access to the kind of money and expertise which a decent greenhouse office might have involved, but it is trying to gather together experts to listen to them on how it will proceed. I have my own views on how to proceed and, indeed, how it might dovetail with another of the key Labor Party platforms, and that is education and the extension of its education focus: research and development. The Labor opposition has the political will to achieve that.

Given that there has been such inaction over a decade and that we are behind in addressing this issue, the question becomes: how will we then achieve it? I think that the neglect of education and research and development by the current government has put us well behind on ways to proceed once we have acknowledged the problem, which the current government has failed to do. I believe that not enough of the proceeds of the resources boom have been invested in research, in innovation and in skills development, because, even if we find a way forward through research and technology, we still need the skills in this country to put it into action. Skills are one of the things which, thanks to government neglect, we are very short of. This is one of the key issues that we will have to address once we have decided to deal with the problem. This whole approach is one— (Time expired)